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Moment Factory Lab is taking social gaming to a new level with GRiD, a life-sized version of Pong—in which you are the paddle.

The Quebec-based multimedia studio worked for a year to translate iconic ’70s gameplay into an “innovative form” using a LIDAR sensor.

It turns out the same technology that controls and navigates autonomous cars can also follow people in public spaces.

“After writing some custom software to detect point cloud clusters (moving humans), we tested it in our black box and were impressed with its accuracy,” according to a blog announcement.

(via Moment Factory Lab)

Turning Moment Factory employees into gaming guinea pigs, the firm slowly evolved GRiD, collecting reactions and feedback to help inform each new version of the oversized competition.

“This allowed us to fine-tune the speed of the gameplay, and inspired us to spice it up by adding some unexpected effects,” the company said.

The first project incubated by the Moment Factory Lab, GRiD was born from a desire to uncover how interactive affordances can enable play in public spaces.

“To explore this question, it was obvious we needed to build something—something that would transform the city into a playground and engage passersby,” the team explained.

But also something that is simple and intuitive enough for anyone to step in at any time, with game mechanics easily controlled by the body and increasingly difficult levels that can be completed quickly.

Despite a meager 21st century revival of arcade video games, the golden age of coin-operated cabinets is long gone. Still, titles like Space Invaders, Pac-Man, and Pong live on as pop culture memories.

One of the earliest video games (certainly the first commercial success), Atari’s Pong was created by Allan Alcorn and Nolan Bushnell as a training exercise. The two-dimensional sports game simulates table tennis: players control in-game paddles by moving them vertically across the left or right side of the screen.

GRiD works the same way, except you are the paddle, jogging back and forth to return the digital volley.

Since its debut at the MAPP_MTL Montreal International Mapping Festival, GRiD has proved a great success.

(via Moment Factory Lab)

“At first, [people] were caught off guard by the unexpected changes in gameplay,” Moment Factory said. “But quickly they began to figure them out, and wanted to play again to improve.”

Like any sporting event, spectators gathered around and teams formed, “spurred on by cheers of encouragement.”

“Witnessing these spontaneous social connections, it immediately became clear that we were rediscovering a social dimension of games that has been missing since the sudden death of arcades in the ’90s,” the company continued. “It was so refreshing to be playing with a person you could see, and to be moving your whole body.”

The technology is still “a bit expensive,” but worth it for Moment Factory, which hopes this kind of public interaction “gets more and more people out of their living rooms and playing together.”

GRiD is the first installment in a series of arcade-themed prototypes under construction by Moment Factory Lab.